This was originally posted to lemmy.pineapplemachine.com: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/5781
It has also been posted to lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/post/591991
Lemmy is federated and decentralized and that means that we can all coexist regardless of our differing political opinions. I think it’s important to preface this by saying that I am not offended by or concerned with anyone’s politics, and I’m certainly not here to argue with anyone about them.
My concern is that users are being banned and content is being removed on lemmy.ml citing a rule that is not publicly stated anywhere that I have seen.
Moderators of lemmy.ml are removing posts and comments which are critical of the Chinese government and are banning their authors.
This came to my attention because of how lemmy user bans are federated just like everything else, and I was confused about why my instance had logged a lemmy.ml user ban citing “orientalism” as the reason for the ban.
Screenshot of my own instance’s modlog, as viewed by an admin
I noticed that the banned user had recently commented on a post in !worldnews@lemmy.ml that had been removed with the reason “Orientalist article”.
Screenshot of banned user’s history on lemmy.ml
Here’s the article that was removed, titled “China may face succession crisis”. It was published by axios.com, which mediabiasfactcheck describes as having “a slight to moderate liberal bias” and gives its second-highest ranking for factual reporting. The article writes unfavorably of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
https://www.axios.com/2023/06/06/china-may-face-succession-crisis
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/axios/
I had not remembered seeing anything in lemmy.ml’s rules that would suggest that “orientalism”—meaning, as I understand it, the depiction or discussion of Asian cultures by people in Western ones—was against the rules. So I checked, and I found that there was not. Not on the instance’s front page, and not in !worldnews@lemmy.ml.
Screenshot of instance rules for lemmy.ml
Screenshot of community rules for !worldnews@lemmy.ml
There is a stated rule against xenophobia, but I think that xenophobia is not widely understood to include Westerners writing critically of the actions of an Asian government.
This is where I went from confused to concerned.
Lemmy instances have public moderation logs, which I think is a very positive thing about the platform. So I looked more closely at lemmy.ml’s moderation log.
Please note that moderation logs are also federated. It’s hard to be 100% sure which instance a mod action is actually associated with, looking at these logs. The previously mentioned user ban and post removal were, I think, definitely actions taken by lemmy.ml moderators. My own instance’s mod log identifies the banning moderator as a lemmy.ml admin, and the removed post was submitted to a lemmy.ml community. I’ve done my best to verify that all of the following removals were really done by lemmy.ml moderators, but I can’t be absolutely certain. Please forgive me if any of them were actually made on other instances that do have an explicitly stated rule against orientalism.
Removed Comment Ah yes. Being against China’s racist genocide is racist. China, the imperialist ethno-state, is clearly innocent. by @CrimsonOnoscopy@beehaw.org reason: Orientalism
Removed Comment Lol. Thinking some countries have better governments than others is supremacist? Whatever, dude. By the way. If there are any countries with decent governments, I don’t know of them. But like. If there were decent countries, they wouldn’t behave like China. by @balerion@beehaw.org reason: Orientalism
These following moderator actions did not specifically cite orientalism, but did not seem to be breaking any of the instance’s or community’s explicitly stated rules.
Banned @0x815@feddit.de reason: Only makes anti russia and anti china, crosspostst from reddit. 2nd temp ban expires: 9d ago
Removed Comment Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are all Colonies of China, which it treats as Colonial Territories, by - Forcibly destroying the local culture. Forcefully extracting to harm of the locals. Genocide, abuse, kidnapping, rape. But there is no point in engaging to you. You are a liar. You know you are. When you deny genocides, you put yourself on the same side as the fascists and reactionaries of the past. by @CrimsonOnoscopy@beehaw.org reason: Rule 1 and 2
I have no affection for the Chinese government and I do not call myself a communist. I would not enforce a rule against orientalism on my own instance. But I think that lemmy.ml’s moderators are entitled to enforce whatever rules they please. It’s only that, as the largest single lemmy instance so far, I believe that they have an obligation to disclose these rules, and an obligation to not ban users or remove content for failing to follow unobvious and unstated rules.
I’d like to raise some awareness about this, and I’d like to openly ask the moderators of lemmy.ml to state the rules that they intend to enforce clearly and explicitly.
I will be very clear and state it again: I am not asking for anyone to change their opinions or to not enforce a rule that they believe in. That is the great thing about lemmy, that we can coexist in this federated community even when we don’t share the same opinions. What I am asking is for lemmy.ml’s rules to be clearly stated, because I think it does not reflect well on the broader community if the predominant instance moderates its users and content according to rules that are not being explicitly disclosed.
No leftist has ever believed that, and it is a bad faith argument.
It’s not that they “believe” it, but it’s a glaring blind spot that takes time to be acknowledged and contended with.
You can go out and be the biggest leftist of all and support LGBT rights, universal healthcare, whatever, but it’s not like people understand every page of socialist theory and worldview on Day 1. There are many Western leftists at this early stage who have not studied topics like the Chinese Revolution (for instance) from a socialist perspective. Naturally, they are going to tend to repeat liberal talking points until they’ve done that.
Sure they one can be a “leftist” who is fighting for “the right thing”, but for me, I know that I have grown massively in my understanding of the world (modern and historical), and continue to do so. I assuredly have blind spots of my own that I have yet to deal with.
This is basically where I am. I’ve learned a lot in my years to see that the world is very complex and nuanced and many assumptions I had were completely baseless. I’ve come to the conclusion that I am far too ignorant of the history and geopolitics of the USSR/China to really feel like I have an informed opinion that isn’t influenced by cold war propaganda. And I just have not had the time to rectify that yet.
Totally, and once you get there you can and should have criticisms of both countries and how they have operated and the decisions their leaders have made. It’s not that they are above criticism, but its exhausting to hear criticisms from people who obviously haven’t done their homework and they let the propaganda (seated in racism/orientalism/whatever Red Scare shit) do the talking.
Yep. This is why I’m really leaning more on the side of the mods and general culture on this instance (and others) than the users flinging loaded language and spreading FUD about the platform.
Extremely dorky to do that on a federated site. Set up an instance and federate.
Nobody seems to give a shit that all major social media is owned by sketchy billionaires who actually have the power to fuck shit up, but one FOSS developer is an ardent communist (but not known to be a member of any org or party where he could actually do anything (no offense)), and all of a sudden that somehow is an issue for just using the software (as intended by the dev!)
I cannot speak for anyone but myself. But as the person who wrote this post, I hope that it has not been misunderstood as criticism of anyone’s politics or ideology. The developers are entitled to their opinions and beliefs.
But people are also entitled to understand what rules they are subject to, and those rules have not been communicated clearly. That point is not disputable: Read the comments on this post to find quite a few examples of people who did not understand the intention behind how the rules were written.
There is not a distinction here between failure to understand and failure to communicate. It is not constructive to blame either side. The reality is that one often must proactively attempt to communicate in a way that avoids such fundamental misunderstandings, and I think that it is in the interest of lemmy.ml’s admins and all the rest of us that the instance’s rules are communicated clearly.
I do not expect anyone to change their opinions or beliefs. What I think is important is that the people coming to lemmy have the rules communicated to them in language that they can understand.
It’s fine to acknowledge tat you don’t have the background information.
Just trust the consensus and intersecting beliefs and analysis of professional academics and historians over internet tankies. Because one group lies more than the other, and it isn’t the academics.
Some of the very first articles I read that pushed me toward leftism were The Responsibility of Intellectuals and Manufacturing Consent. So no I’m not apt to blindly accept the consensus of academics and Western elites without looking at it as closely as I can.
I’m not saying blind spots don’t exist. What I was doing is calling out a genocide denier for using bad-faith arguments.